One of the keys to earning cash online is to understand how to find buyers, that is people who’re on a mission to buy something. Sometimes these people can be easy to find and sometimes they can be elusive. In the best case scenario we want to find a market that spends money and then give it what it wants. However, things don’t always work out that smoothly in the real world. In this article we’ll look at some ideas you can use to find buyers when a niche blog is already getting traffic, although it isn’t converting well, and how to make course corrections or even re-target a site to bring in buyers, not socializers.

Find the Real Buyers

First of all, does the niche market you have under consideration spend money? Do they buy stuff online regularly? It’s all well and good to get traffic but if the audience that you get doesn’t consist of buyers, people who’re wanting to buy what you’re trying to sell or promote, then this is a problem. Visitors may not be buyers for a number of reasons.

For example, I helped my son set up a niche blog about toys related to a popular anime cartoon. My initial research showed that the traffic levels are good and that there were a number of affiliate options that would work. The blog got decent traffic but it didn’t convert as well as I’ve seen other niche blogs with similar traffic levels. Why did this happen?

I suspected that it was geared toward an age group that, for the most part, doesn’t have access to credit cards or PayPal accounts. They may click through to a merchant’s site but they can’t buy unless they can drag a parent to the PC and convince them to whip out their credit card. Some other people have mentioned problems converting other demographic groups or getting more ‘infotainment’ seekers than buyers. If you find yourself in a niche like this what can you do?

The best idea I’ve found is to begin adding keywords that will bring in people who buy for the original target audience. This means using keyword combinations with terms ‘gifts for’ your target demographic group type keywords. For example, “[cartoon name] gifts for kids” or “gifts for senior golfers” Typically, it just requires a little sideways step to begin to find this traffic. You will need to use multiple variations of the long tail both in your post titles and your incoming anchor text to produce traffic but you should see a noticeable increase in your conversion rate as you do.

Bring In New Buyers

You may have a money making niche but you realize that you’ve pretty much hit the top of where you can go with that keyword. You rank #1 in Google for your keyword and you’re making $10 a day or so on Adsense, EPN or other monetization but you want more.

The course correction you can make is in this case is to bring in additional buyers from related niches. It works much the same way as our example above. We add new keywords internally and new anchor text externally. For example, if you had a niche blog on oil filters you could add in air filters and so forth with the goal of getting new traffic on these new keywords in addition to that on your old keyword.

In most cases, it’s best to stay focused on a particular niche and tightly related niches but, it can work to simply increase your keyword umbrella to cover a wider range of related products or services. The only problem is that this greatly increases the link building promotional work you will need to do.

Starting Over From Scratch

Sometimes even the best laid plans for a niche blog goes wrong. You may end up not getting sufficient traffic for your keywords or, even worse, almost all of your traffic is ‘infotainment’ traffic which won’t bring in much money. Under these circumstances you may want to ‘reboot’ the blog with new keywords.

For example, let’s say you bought a pre-owned domain called thefunnyturtles.com. You found that the keywords ‘funny turtle videos’ and ‘funny turtle pictures’ brought in a lot of visitors and you built your blog around them, hoping it would become the turtle version of icanhascheezburger. Well, you got some traffic, maybe about 300-500 visitors a day, but not as much as you had hoped. Monetization has also been a mess. Your Adsense got smart priced so you tried EPN, Amazon, Buy.com and more and nothing worked, nothing produced decent cash.

Your choice would be to dedicate more time and build it into a social flagship blog with the hope of developing huge traffic where shear numbers would make up for the poor click through rate or, if you don’t want to spend the time, restart the blog with new keywords. In our example, we would change the blog title to “Discount Turtle Supplies” and start adding posts extolling the virtues of turtle food and other products. Since you had already gotten some general authority on ‘turtles’ to a degree, this would help your new emphasis on turtle supplies.

You can either leave the old posts or delete them. In the cases where I’ve done this I’ve left them but some people like to start over completely fresh. Either approach is likely to cause the domain take a short term ranking hit from Google but you’ll often come roaring back with the new keywords in a few months. You will almost certainly lose your social traffic but they weren’t buying anything anyway.

Don’t Give Up

The most important thing is to not give up. True, there can be some hopeless sites. Not every niche site can be a winner. You will build sites that looked promising on paper but that are lucky to see one search visitor a month. Other sites might get 1000’s of visitors a day but still may not produce buying traffic no matter what you do. But, this is only if you build enough niche sites and don’t get stuck on tweaking just one site. Just keep building and promoting niche blogs. And remember, a non-producing site can often be used to support the launch and promotion of a related site that may very well earn cash online for you.

Frank Carr April 10th, 2009 SEO

SEO
buyers, conversion rate, demographic group, infotainment, long tail keywords, niche blog, social traffic, target audience, traffic